70 years later, Marine veteran, 96, recalls battle for Iwo Jima

Charlie Gubish was a 26-year-old Marine private 70 years ago when he landed on Iwo Jima. He almost didn't get off the island alive.

Charlie Gubish was a 26-year-old Marine private 70 years ago when he landed on Iwo Jima. He almost didn't get off the island alive.

David VendittaOf The Morning Call

Charlie Gubish couldn't land on Iwo Jima the day he was supposed to because the beach was too cluttered.

Charlie Gubish grew up in the Wassergass section of Lower Saucon Township, the sixth of seven children born to dairy farmers. His mother died when he was 5. He attended the Southeastern School on Hellertown-Ironville Road through sixth grade, then left to help on the farm.

In 1937, when he was 18, he got a job in the soaking pits at Bethlehem Steel. Two years later, he started driving trucks in the company's fire department. He married, lived in an apartment on Mechanic Street in south Bethlehem and had two sons.

The war against Germany and Japan had been raging for several years when Gubish signed up for the Marines, leaving his young family in the early summer of 1944.

The 3rd Marine Division, in which Gubish served, landed on Iwo Jima on Feb. 24, 1945. The famous flag-raising on Mount Suribachi had taken place the day before. The first Marines on the island came ashore Feb. 19.

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The day I was supposed to go in, we were on this big troopship. We had to go down the ropes on the side of the ship into these Higgins boats, and these boats would take us in to the beach. We went around in circles in groups of four or five boats. I was in a special group. I was a private, 26 years old, in the 134th Replacement Draft. They used to call me Pop, because I was a lot older than most of the guys — they were only 18, 19.

Charlie Gubish was a 26-year-old Marine private 70 years ago when he landed on Iwo Jima. He almost didn't get off the island alive. (Harry Fisher)

We weren't supposed to do no fighting. We were going in to help unload ships wherever they needed us. But they couldn't land us because the beach was so tied up, with smashed equipment and whatnot.

The next day we go in on this LST [landing ship, tank], and it was cold that day, drizzling, foggy. That LST got us onto the beach. They opened the plank, I run off, all of us were running off, jumping off the big gate. So now when half of us were off, the LST was starting to go back in the ocean. He went way out, we could hardly see him. We're standing there. We didn't know what the hell to do. We had no officers or nothing.

Somebody said, "Look at those dead Japs laying there." They were on a pile about 3 feet high, with rubber ponchos on top of them. All we could see was their shoes sticking out. One guy said, "What the hell, they've got shoes like we do." And their leggings were the same. We pulled the ponchos up a little higher. They were dead Marines.

All of a sudden we see this LST coming back, back, back. And then the rest of the group got off. Then it was almost dark. That was a day that if a Japanese would've come up to me and shot me, I would've thanked him. I was so disgusted, cold, wet.

An officer told us we should dig in for the night. But the dead Marines were laying so thick on the beach, we could hardly find a space to dig a foxhole. It was awful. My foxhole buddy and me saw there was something like a pillbox made out of blocks. And boy we thought all we had to do was dig out the sand a little and put our poncho over the top and we'd have a nice hole. But there was a dead Marine on the pillbox with his head hanging down. Well, I didn't want to move him and my buddy didn't want to move him. We dug another hole.

Our job was to unload these LSTs, be a stretcher bearer, carry supplies to the front line. We'd roll 50-gallon oil drums down the ramp of the LST. We'd take the food off the ship and make piles on the beach. We did that for so many days. Then we had to go pick up the dead, take off their dog tags. That was a hard job to do. I did that for two, three days. I hoped that I never did it again. We picked the dead up and put them on payloaders, a couple at a time, then the payloaders buried them in that sand.

The tanks, alligators and ducks [amphibious tractors and transports] didn't want to drive over the dead. I saw Japanese — and some of our men — squashed as flat as the palm of my hand.

One time it was pretty close to getting dark and a captain said, "Hey Gubish, take your squad and some other men and take some supplies up to B Company." I just happened to see a corporal walk by. Nobody liked to lead because they're the ones that got hit — sometimes the Japanese snuck up and stabbed you in the back. I said, "There's a corporal, why should I lead?" He called the corporal over.

So we went up a ridge, and the fighting was up on a second ridge. I'm behind the corporal carrying a box, and it was dark now but you could still see. We just got up to this coral rock, and a Japanese stepped out in front of it. The corporal saw him and I saw him too. We both dropped. We fired our rifles, emptying the clips. Then we're laying there waiting five, 10 minutes. Nothing moves. We pick our stuff up, and we're walking with our rifles slung over our shoulders.

Then we come back down, and we're all afraid to go by this rock, and there was nothing there.

But the next morning, Marines that were in the outfit up on the ridge found five dead Japanese. One had a rifle and one had a pistol. I think they wanted to surrender but we never gave them the chance. Why would one guy step out there like that and they have one rifle and one pistol between the five of them?

I don't know anything about the flag-raising [Feb. 23]. All I know is that somebody said there was a flag up on Mount Suribachi.

There was so much stuff going on, you had no time to think. You were watching every move, your head's going back and forth to make sure there's no Japanese coming at you. Sometimes you didn't know who your officers were, because they got killed and somebody else would come in, and they got killed.

When I was wounded, we had to go up to relieve B Company on the second ridge, so we were traveling through an open area. A big guy we used to call Texas was leading and there was about 10 guys behind him, and my squad of six was behind them. We were 5 to 8 feet apart all the time when we walked.

That morning, before we left the command post, my foxhole buddy said, "Charlie, if something happens to me, see that my father gets this pocket watch." The watch had some kind of medal on it. I said, "What are you talking about, Graeter?" He said, "Every day, somebody gets it." I took it that he thought he was going to get killed. I didn't want to listen to him.

But anyway, as we're walking, they were joking and laughing up front. I couldn't see them. A mortar shell exploded on the right-hand side of me about 50 feet away. Nobody paid any attention to it. At the same time, I saw there was some kind of a motor laying near me, from maybe an airplane. And before I knew, a mortar landed on the left-hand side about the same distance. I thought the first was one of ours that fell short, but when I saw the second one land at the same distance, I figured that was for us, so I hollered "Hit the deck!" I'm diving down to lay alongside this motor, and that's all I remember.

The shell hit between my foxhole buddy and my other buddy in the squad. It knocked me out.

Somebody must've called the command post. A corpsman saw me laying there and he went past me — he was treating some others. When I came to, I couldn't talk. I was in shock. I seen my foxhole buddy laying dead, and my other buddy laying dead. I got up. The corpsman saw me and come running back. He said, "I thought you were dead." Something was burning me on my left side. He saw that I had my hand on it, and the blood. He quick cut my jacket away and put a compress on it.

That was about 10 o'clock in the morning. From that time on, I didn't know anything. The next morning when I wake up, I'm on a hospital ship in a big ward with maybe 50 other wounded and some nurse going around with a needle injecting the guys with antibiotics. To this day, I don't know how the hell I got on that hospital ship.

My one buddy, his head was split open, blood running out. He was from Boston. My foxhole buddy would have lived, the way a corpsman told me later on, because he only had a shrapnel wound in his leg, but the concussion killed him. Son of a gun, when he told me I should send that pocket watch to his father, he was right about getting killed.

He was only 19, but he'd watched over me. He did. All I knew was he came from Dayton, Ohio, and his last name, Graeter. I didn't get his watch — we'd left our stuff in the command post — and I could never find his parents.

That bothers me, about his pocket watch. Every Memorial Day, Veterans Day, that comes in my mind. I just can't talk about it.

They sent me to Guam and I was in a fleet hospital for two weeks. Then they put me in the 9th Marines a short period, until they found out I couldn't hear. My eardrums were broken from that mortar shell, so they sent me to the division hospital on Guam. From there they took me out of the combat area and put me in the Guam fire department, and I was there until the war ended.

I had it good in the fire department. We were right next to a B-29 base. There was no windows on the firehouse. When the B-29s took off, you'd think they were coming right through the building. The pilots used to come down to the firehouse and ask for Coke. We could get all the Coke we wanted. They could get all the booze they wanted, but they couldn't get Coke. We used to trade — a bottle of booze for a case of Coke.

In December [1945], we were in San Diego for two weeks trying to get home, but the troop trains were full. Then they took us up to Great Lakes, Ill. We were discharged and put on trains Christmas Day, and we didn't get to Philadelphia until 2 o'clock the next morning. How are we going to get home? The place was dead. There was no trolleys, nothing.

Four of us got together and chipped in for a taxi. That was our Christmas gift.

Epilogue

Gubish, a rifleman with sharpshooter and expert badges, was honorably discharged as a private first class. He has a Purple Heart medal for the wound he suffered March 13, 1945, three days before Iwo Jima was secured.

"The Japanese must've had good steel, because for 70 years I'm carrying their shrapnel in my chest," he said. "The doctors said they couldn't take it out of me because it was too close to my heart. It would either kill me or come out. I can still feel it, right on the edge of my skin."

Gubish returned to the fire department at Bethlehem Steel, working there until his retirement. His wife, Ethel, whom he married in 1940, worked for many years at Modern Slacks in Allentown. She died in 1998 at age 78. Their sons are Charles and Richard, both in Bethlehem.

Gubish lives in the Sterling Heights retirement community in Hanover Township, Northampton County. He is 96 and has seven grandchildren, 14 great-grandchildren and six great-great-grandchildren.

He belongs to the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the Disabled American Veterans. His name is on a brick in the Pacific War Memorial's Walkway of Honor at the entrance to Marine Corps Base Hawaii.

His foxhole buddy, Marine Pvt. Herman R. Graeter, who died in the mortar blast that wounded Gubish, is buried in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.